Word: pradesh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stunning upset, Mrs. Gandhi lost her own carefully nurtured constituency in Uttar Pradesh by 55,000 votes to Raj Narain, a socialist buffoon whom she had trounced by 112,000 votes in 1971. "India is Indira, and Indira is India," Congress Party President D.K. Barooah used to boast. He will say it no more. Defeated in an adjoining constituency by 76,000 votes was Sanjay, in his first try for elective office. Of 542 seats in the new Lok Sabha (Lower House), Mrs. Gandhi's Congress Party won only 153 (v. 355 in the last Parliament), while Desai...
Opposition leaders were also wondering-about whether Mrs. Gandhi would abide by the election results if they went against her. They noted that paramilitary police, who had been moved to rural voting locations the week before, were suddenly regrouped. In an ominous speech in Uttar Pradesh on March 17, Mrs. Gandhi accused the opposition leaders of trying to create chaos, and the press of printing stories damaging to the national welfare. Some Janata leaders were sufficiently unnerved that they spent the next two nights at the homes of friends-just in case the police should come for them as they...
...mysteries, however, is how Mrs. Gandhi, the compleat politician, so misjudged the national mood when she called the elections. She is known to have been worried last fall about the sterilization backlash and other bureaucratic tyrannies in North India. But in November Sanjay made a whirlwind tour of Uttar Pradesh and was greeted by the usual crowds-supplied, of course, by the local authorities. Similarly, when Sanjay and his elder brother Rajiv visited a community of resettled slumdwellers, they were given a tumultuous welcome-as ordered by party officials. Mrs. Gandhi, deprived of a free press and served...
...city of Muzaffarnagar, 70 miles north of Delhi, vasectomy camps handled between 1,200 and 1,800 cases a day. Each operation took five to ten minutes, and there was often no follow-up when the patient suffered postoperative bleeding, infection or even tetanus. The state quota for Uttar Pradesh had been set at 400,000, but the chief minister raised it to 1.5 million, presumably to please Sanjay. Some 700,000 operations were actually performed, a phenomenal increase over the previous year's total of 129,000. Villagers told bitter jokes against Mrs. Gandhi, one of them based...
...more resentment than the government's campaign to encourage sterilization in order to curb India's disastrous population explosion. According to one official count, this ambitious birth-control program resulted in more than 7 million vasectomies throughout India last year. In the town of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, where Mrs. Gandhi's son Sanjay is running for a parliamentary seat, villagers told Malkin that they had taken to sleeping in the fields to avoid being picked up and sterilized, which many of them seemed to equate with castration. The town market of Gauriganj was closed...